Righting a Wrong, U.S. to Honor WWII Vet’s Bravery

Ben Kuroki fearlessly flew 58 combat missions over Europe and North Africa, but on a February day in 1944, before an elite crowd in San Francisco, he realized he was more afraid of his own countrymen.

Arrayed before him were 700 members of the Commonwealth Club, the oldest civic forum in the nation, made up of newspaper editors, educators and businessmen. The kind of people who ran California. A Hearst newspaper on that day, Feb. 4, 1944, announced his appearance: “Jap to address S.F. Club.”

About 190 miles away, over the Sierra, 10,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were being held behind barbed wire at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

Days earlier, Kuroki’s speech to a radio station had been canceled when word of the speech caused an uproar.

The 27-year-old Army Air Forces tail gunner, born on a Nebraska potato farm, inhaled deeply and began:

“When you live with men under combat conditions for 15 months, you begin to understand what brotherhood is all about, what equality and tolerance really mean. They’re no longer just words.”

Forty-five minutes later, he was done, and a corner had been turned. His audience, impressed by his wartime accomplishments and pleas for a return to tolerance, gave Kuroki a 10-minute standing ovation.

On Friday, Kuroki, 88, of Camarillo, is set to receive much more.

At a ceremony in Nebraska, his World War II buddies plan to present him with a Distinguished Service Medal, one of the nation’s highest military honors.

The honor was approved earlier this week by the Defense Department, said an official in the office of U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

“It’s justice that he gets this award,” said Carroll “Cal” Stewart, 87, a retired Nebraska newspaperman and wartime colleague, who launched the effort to bestow the medal. “The government owes him.”

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In the tiny South Platte River town of Hershey, Neb., the Kuroki family -- Ben, five sisters, four brothers and his Japanese-born parents -- was insulated from the rampant racial prejudice that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

But his ethnicity became a problem when he and his brother Fred tried to enlist. They were turned down on their first attempt but found a recruiter 150 miles away who was willing to sign them up, at a time when the U.S. military regularly discharged Japanese American soldiers.

“I called and asked if nationality was a problem. He said, ‘Heck no, I get two bucks for every person I sign up,’ ” Kuroki said. “So my brother and I drove all the way to Grand Island, gave our pledge of allegiance, and that’s how we got into the Army.”

From basic training on, the brothers had to fight to fight the war. Both endured racial insults.

Fred was eventually taken off the military roster and transferred to a civilian ditch-digging unit.

But high-ranking officers, impressed with Ben’s dependability and skill with armaments, stepped up at the last minute to keep him on the active list.

Despite an Army-wide ban on crew members of Japanese descent in bombers, Kuroki snagged a tail-gunner’s slot in the 93rd Bomb Group that was headed for England in December 1942.

Soon they were ordered to bomb targets in North Africa.

Anti-aircraft fire at first terrified Kuroki. But it also brought him an odd sense of peace.

“For the first time, I belonged,” he said. “Thereafter, we fought as a team and as family.”

Over the next 12 months, Kuroki flew two dozen missions, including a harrowing raid on oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania, that killed 310 fliers in his group. On another mission, he was captured when his plane ran out of fuel over Morocco.

He was thrown into a makeshift prison. Later, he and his crewmates slipped away from their captors and were smuggled back to England.

With 25 missions under his belt by the end of 1943, Kuroki could have gone home. But he pleaded to stay on for five more assignments.

“I wanted to prove my loyalty,” he said.

On his 30th raid, Kuroki was nearly killed over Germany when a hot piece of shrapnel tore open the top of his gunner’s turret.

A grainy black-and-white photo shows a grinning Kuroki popping his head through the hole torn by the shrapnel.

For his tenacity, Kuroki’s crew gave him the nickname “Most Honorable Son.”

The War Department gave Kuroki a Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf clusters.

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Kuroki was the first Japanese American to return from combat, in early 1944.

The storied 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese American volunteers under a flag that said “Remember Pearl Harbor,” had arrived in Europe in August 1943.

But back home, all anyone saw in Kuroki were his Asian features.

There he was in Denver, in full uniform, and another man refused to share a cab with him. “I don’t want to ride with no lousy Jap!” Kuroki recalled the man shouting.

The War Department, which had banned him from bombing missions, and nearly refused to draft him, now wanted him to tour the internment camps, where 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans had been sent after 1942, to boost enlistments. Kuroki wasn’t eager.

Kuroki said he was shocked when he arrived at the first camp, Heart Mountain, in Wyoming. Guards with bayonets and rifles were at the gates, and barbed wire surrounded the settlement. Excited internees flocked to him for autographs. But others felt disdain, calling him derogatory names, Kuroki recalls.

“It was unbelievable,” he said. “Here they were drafting Japanese Americans out of internment camps. I didn’t refuse the assignment, but by the third camp, I threw up my hands. I was tired of it.”

After the public relations blitz ended, Kuroki set his sights on his next goal.

He wanted to fly the newly built B-29 bomber in the Pacific theater -- raids that would take him over his parents’ Japanese homeland.

For Kuroki, it would be the ultimate show of loyalty to the United States.

But he would again first have to take on his government.

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Unlike before, the Army refused to budge on its ban against anyone of Japanese descent flying in bombers, even though several officers supported him, Kuroki said.

His combat unit was preparing to fly to Tinian Island, from which they would launch bombing runs over Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

The night before they departed, Kuroki enlisted the help of a Nebraska congressman, Carl T. Curtis. Together they went to a rail station where a telegraph operator worked the graveyard shift.

Curtis’ urgent plea to the War Department produced results. The next morning, Secretary of War Henry Stimson responded with a letter.

“I am happy to inform you that, by reason of his splendid record, it has been decided to except Sergeant Kuroki from the provisions of the policy.”

Kuroki has the framed letter, signed by Stimson, on a mantel at his home.

“That’s my most prized possession,” he said recently.

Kuroki flew 28 missions out of Tinian Island. The B-29 in which he sat as gunner was christened “The Most Honorable Sad Saki.”

His plane was among more than 300 aircraft that dropped more than 1,500 tons of explosives over Tokyo on March 10, 1945.

Kuroki remembers the blood-red skies as his bomber streaked away from Tokyo and other Japanese cities, where more than 200,000 residents would die.

“It bothered me a lot -- all the women and children,” he said. “But it was war.”

He escaped combat injuries but continued to suffer racial affronts. One night, a drunken U.S. soldier stumbled into the barracks and shouted, “Tojo and Kuroki, damned Japs.”

Kuroki replied, “You can call Tojo a damned Jap, but don’t call me one!” The man then attacked him with a knife, necessitating 24 stitches to the head.

When the rest of his crewmates were called to receive Distinguished Flying Crosses for their Pacific service, Kuroki was left behind in the barracks.

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After the war, booking agents tried to put Kuroki on speaking tours. He turned them down. He wanted to get on with his life, he told them.

Kuroki rarely spoke of his service during his long years as a newspaperman.

He was so modest, in fact, that a colleague who had lunch with him nearly every day for a decade learned of his wartime achievements in a newspaper article.

Kuroki married and had three daughters. He and his wife, Shig, moved to California in the 1960s, where he became an editor at the Ventura Star-Free Press.

Since retiring in 1984, Kuroki has led a quiet life of family and golf at a senior community in Ventura County. Recently, though, his health has been in decline.

His friends say it is important to set the record straight, to make amends, while Kuroki can still enjoy it.

“People used to talk about this man who wore his uniform at the camps. It’s generally understood that he did this with a lot of anger. So he’s looked at as something of a hero for having made such a strong statement,” said John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, headquartered in San Francisco.

“If there was any anger, it was more about what the government did, and not what he did.”